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Wendell Phillips, 



BY 



THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGIMSON 



WENDELL THILLIPS 



THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 



REPRINTED FROM " THE NATION' 




BOSTON ^' 

LEE AND SIIEPARl), PFBLTSHEllS 

NEW YORK 

CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM 

1884 






Copyright, 1884, 
By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 



All rights reserved. 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

[from the NEW-YORK NATION, BY THOMAS WENTWORTU HIGGINSON.] 



WENDELL PHILLIPS, son of John and Sarah 
* ' (Walley) Phillips, was born Nov. 29, 181L Like 
so many eminent men in New England, he traced his 
line of descent to a Puritan clergyman ; in this case, 
the Rev. George Phillips, first minister of Watertown, 
Mass. From that ancestor was descended, in the fifth 
generation, John Phillips, first mayor of Boston, elected 
in 1822, as a sort of compromise candidate between 
Harrison (iray Otis and Josiah Quincy, who equally 
divided public favor. John Phillips is credited by tra- 
dition with "a pliable disposition," which he clearly 
did not transmit to his son. He was a graduate of 
Harvard College in 1788, held various public offices, 
and was for many years "Town Advocate and Public 
Prosecutor," a function which certainly became, in a 
less official sense, hereditar}'^ in the family. He was a 
man of wealth and reputation ; and he built for himself 
a large mansion, which is conspicuous in the early en- 
gravings of Boston, and is still standing at the lower 
corner of Beacon and Walnut Streets. There Wendell 
Phillips was born. He was placed by birth in the most 
favored worldly position ; the whole Phillips family 
being rich and influential, at a time when social demar- 



Vi WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

cations were more distinct than now. He was, how- 
ever, brought up wisely, since John Phillips made this 
rule for his children: "Ask no man to do for you any 
thing that you are not able and willing to do for your- 
self." Accordingly his son claimed, in later life, that 
there Avas hardly any kind of ordinary trade or manual 
labor used in New England at which he had not done 
many a day's work. He attended the Boston Latin 
School, entered Harvard College before he was sixteen, 
and was graduated (in 1831) before he was twent}^ in 
the same class with Motley the historian. Both of 
them had personal beauty, elegance, and social posi- 
tion ; and Mr. Phillips always readily testified that both 
of them had certain narrow prejudices, which he out- 
grew very soon, and Motley in the end. 

It is rare for any striking career to have a dramatic 
beginning ; but it may be truly said of Wendell Phil- 
lips, that his first recorded speech established his repu- 
tation as an orator, and determined the whole course of 
his life. Being graduated at the Cambridge La^v" 
School in 1834, he was admitted to the bar in the same 
year. In 1835 he witnessed the mobbing of Garrison ; 
in 1836 joined the American Anti-slavery Society. In 
1837 occurred the great excitement which raged in Con- 
gress around John Quincy Adams when he stood for 
the right of petition ; and in November of that year 
Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, 111., while 
defending his press from a pro-slavery mob. The Rev. 
Dr. Channing and others asked the use of Faneuil 
Hall for a meeting to express their indignation : the 
city authorities refused it ; Dr. Channing then wrote an 
appeal to the citizens of Boston, and the authorities 
yielded to the demand. At the Faneuil-hall meeting 
Jonathan Phillips, a Avealthy citizen and a second 
cousin of Wendell Phillips, presided; Dr. Channing 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. VU 

spoke, and then two 3^oiing lawyers, Ilallett and Ilil- 
lurd. James Trecothick Austin, Attorney-General of 
the State, then addressed the audience from the gal- 
lery ; and his speech soon proved the meeting to be 
divided on the main question, with a bias toward the 
wrong side. He said that Lovejoy died as the fool 
dieth, and compared his murderers to the men who 
threw the tea into Boston Harbor. The audience 
broke into applause, and seemed ready to go with 
Austin ; when Wendell Phillips came on the platform, 
amid opposition that scarcely allowed him to be heard. 
Almost at his first words, lie took the meeting in his 
hands, and brought it back to its real object. " When 
I heard," he said, " the gentleman lay down principles 
which placed the murderers of Alton side by side with 
Otis and Hancock, with Qnincy and Adams, I thought 
these pictured lips [pointing to their portraits] Avould 
have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant Amer- 
ican, the slanderer of the dead." From that moment 
the tide was turned, the audience carried, the oratorical 
fame of Wendell Phillips secured, and his future career 
determined. From this time forward, and while slavery 
remained, he was first and chiefly an abolitionist; all 
other reforms were subordinate to this, and this was his 
life. To this he sacrificed his social position, his early 
friendships, his professional career. Possessing a suffi- 
cient independent income, he did not incur the added 
discomfort of poverty : but, being rich, he made him- 
self, as it were, poor through life ; reduced his personal 
wants to the lowest terms, earned all the money he 
could by lecturing, and gave away all that lie could 
spare. 

He was fortunate in wedding a wife in perfect sj'm- 
pathy with him, — Miss Ann T. Greene, — and, indeed, 
he always said that her influence first made him an abo- 



viii WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

litionist. A life-long invalid, rarely leaving her room, 
she had yet such indomitable courage, such keenness of 
wit, such insight into character, that she really divided^ 
■with him the labors of his career. It is impossible for 
those who knew them both to think of him without her; 
it is sad to think of her without him. They lived on 
Essex Street, in a region almost deserted by residences 
and given over to shops; the house was plain and bare, 
without and within ; they had no children ; and, except 
during the brief period when their adopted daughter 
was with them, the home seemed almost homeless out- 
side of the walls of Mrs. Phillips's apartment. There 
indeed — for her husband and her few intimates — peace 
and courage ruled, with joy and hilarity not seldom 
added. But for many years Mr. Phillips was absent a 
great deal from Boston, on his lecture tours, though 
these rarely extended far westward, or over very long 
routes. Both he and his wife regarded these lectures 
as an important mission ; for, even if he only spoke on 
" The Lost Arts " or " Street Life in Europe," it gave 
him a personal hold upon each community he visited, 
and the next time, perhaps, an anti-slavery lecture 
would be demanded, or one on temperance or woman's 
rights. He always claimed this sort of preliminary in- 
fluence, in particular, for his lecture on Daniel O'Con- 
nell, which secured for him a great following among our 
Irish fellow-citizens, at a time when they were bitterly 
arrayed against the anti-slavery movement. — • 

^ Unlike his coadjutor Edmund Quinc}-, Wendell Phil- 
lips disavowed being a non-resistant. That scruple, as 
well as the alleged pro-slavery character of the Consti- 
tution, precluded most of the Garrisonian abolitionists 
from voting, or holding office ; but Phillips was checked 
by his anti-slavery convictions alone. This fact made 

/ him, like Theodore Parker, a connecting link between 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. IX 

the non-resistants and the younger school of abolition- 
ists who believed in physical opposition to the local 
encroachments, at least, of the slave-power. They 
formed various loosely-knit associations for this pur- 
pose, of which he was not a member ; but lie Avas ready 
with sjanpathy and money. In one of their efforts, the 
Burns rescue, he always regretted the mishap, whicli, 
for want of due explanation, threw liiin on the side of 
caution, where he did not belong. At the Faneuil-Hall 
meeting, which it was proposed to transfer bodily to 
Court Square, Theodore Parker was notified of the 
project, but misunderstood the signal ; Wendell Phil- 
lips was never even notified, for want of time, and 
was very unjustly blamed afterwards. It is doubtful 
whether he was, in his very fibre, a man of action ; but 
he never discouraged those who were such, nor had he 
the slightest objection to violating law where human 
freedom was at stake. A man of personal courage, he~ 
eminently was. In the intense and temporary revival 
of mob feeling in Boston, in the autumn and winter of 
1860, when a John Brown meeting was broken up by 
the same class of "gentlemen of property and stand- 
ing " who had mobbed Garrison, Wendell Phillips was 
the object of special hostility. lie was then speaking 
every Sunday at the Music Hall, to Theodore Parker's 
congregation, and was each Sunday followed home by 
a mob, while personally defended by a self-appointed 
body-guard. On one occasion the demonstrations were 
so threatening that he was with difficulty persuaded to 
leave the hall by a side entrance ; and was driven to his 
home, with a fast horse, by the same Dr. David Thayer 
who watched his dying bed. For several nights his 
house was guarded by a small body-guard of friends 
within, and by the police without. During all this 
time, there was something peculiarly striking and char- 



:X WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

acteristic in his demeanor. There was absolutely noth- 
ing of bull-dog combativeness ; but a careless, buoyant, 
almost patrician air, as if nothing in the way of mob- 
violence were worth considering, and all threats of 
-opponents were simply beneath contempt. He seemed 
like some English Jacobite nobleman on the scaffold, 
carelessly taking snuif, and kissing his hand to the 
crowd, before laying his head upon the block. — 

No other person than Garrison could be said to do 
much in the way of guiding the " Garrisonian " anti- 
slavery movement ; and Wendell Phillips was thor- 
oughly and absolutely loyal to his great chief, while 
slavery existed. In the details of the agitation, per- 
haps the leading organizers were two remarkable 
women, ]\Iaria Weston Chapman and Abby Kelley 
Foster. The function of Wendell Phillips was to sup- 
ply the eloquence, but he was not wanting either in 
grasp of principles or interest in details. He thor- 
oughly accepted the non-voting theory, and was ready 
not only to speak at any time, but to write, — which 
he found far harder, — in opposition to those abolition- 
ists, like Lj-sander Spooner, who were always tr^-ing to 
prove the United-States Constitution an anti-slavery 
instrument. Mr. Phillips's "The Constitution a Pro- 
slavery Compact " (1844), though almost wliolly a com- 
pilation from the Madison papers, was for many 3-ears 
a storehouse of argument for the disunion abolitionists ; 
and it went through a series of editions. 

In later life he often wrote letters to the newspapers, 
in which he did not always appear to advantage. But 
he did very little writing, on the whole : it always came 
Jiard to him, and he had, indeed, a theory that the same 
person could never succeed both in speaking and writ- 
ing, because they required such different habits of mind. 
-Even as to reports of his speeches, he was quite indif- 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. XI 

ferent; and it was rather hard to persuade liim to inter- 
est himself in the voliune of his " Speeclies, Lectures, 
and Essays," which was prepared by James Redpath 
in 18G3. That editor was a good deal censured at the 
time for retaining in these speeclies the expressions of 
applause or disapprobation which had appeared in the 
original newspaper reports, and which the orator had 
erased. It is, however, fortunate that Mr. Redpath 
did tliis: it not only increases their value as memo- 
rials of the time, but it brings out that close contact 
and intercommunion with his audience whicli formed 
an inseparable part of the oratory of ^Vendell Phillips. 
The latter also published " The Constitution a Pro- 
slavery Compact " (1844), "Can Abolitionists vote or 
take Office?" (1845), " Review of Spooner's Constitu- 
tionality of Slavery'' (1847), and other similar pam- 
phlets. He moreover showed real literary power and an 
exquisite felicity in the delineation of character, through 
his memorial tributes to some of his friends; as, for in- 
stance, the philanthropist Mrs. Eliza Garnaut of Boston, 
whose only daughter (now Mrs. G. W. Smalley of Lon- 
don) he afterward adopted. ^ 

The keynote to the oratory of Wendell Phillips lay ■* 
in this: that it was essentially conversational, — the 
conversational raised to its highest power. Perhaps no 
orator ever spoke with so little apparent effort, or began 
so entirely on the plane of his average hearers. It w\as "^ 
as if he simply repeated, in a little louder tone, what 
he had just been saying to some familiar friend at his 
elbow. The effect was absolutely disarming. Those ac- 
customed to spread-eagle eloquence felt perhaps a slight • 
sense of disappointment. Could this quiet, eas}-, effort- 
less man be Wendell Phillips? But he held them by 
his very quietness : it did not seem to have occurred to 
him, to doubt his power to hold them. The poise of his 



Xii WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

manly figure, the easy grace of his attitude, the thrill- 
ing modulation of his j.)erfectly trained voice, the dig- 
nity of his gesture, the keen penetration of his eye, all 
aided to keep his hearers in hand. The colloquialism 
was never relaxed, but it was familiarity without loss of 
keeping. When he said "isn't" and "wasn't," — or 
even, like an Englishman, dropped his g's, and said 
"bein'" and "doin'," — it did not seem inelegants he 
might almost have been ungrammatical, and it would 
not have impaired the fine air of the man. Then, as the 
argument went on, the voice grew deeper, the action 
more animated, and the sentences would come in a long, 
sonorous swell, still easy and graceful, but powerful as 
the soft stretching of a tiger's paw. He could be terse 
as Carlyle, or his periods could be as prolonged and 
cumulative as those of Choate or Evarts: no matter; 
they carried, in either case, the same charm. He was 
^ surpassed by Garrison in grave moral logic ; by Parker, 
in the grasp of facts, and in merciless sarcasm ; by 
Sumner, in copiousness of illustration ; by Douglass, in 
humor and in pathos : but, after all, in the perfect 
moulding of the orator, he surpassed not merely each 
of these, but all of them combined. What the Revolu- 
tionary orators would now seem to us, we cannot tell: 
but it is pretty certain, that of all our post-Revolution- 
ary speakers, save Webster onh', Wendell Phillips stood 
at the head ; while he and Webster represented t3'pes 
of oratory so essentially different that any comparison 
between them is like trying to compare an oak-tree and 
a pine. -' 

He was not mood}^ or variable, or did not seem so : 
yet he always approached the hour of speaking with 
a certain reluctance, and never could quite sympathize 
with the desire to listen either to him or to any one else. 
As he walked toward the lecture-room he would say to 



WENDELT. PniLLIPS. XIU 

a friend, "Why do people go to lectures? There is a 
respectable man and woman ; the}^ must have a good 
home: why do they leave it for the sake of hearing 
somebody talk?" This was not affectation, but the 
fatigue of playing too long on one string. Just before 
coming on the platform at a convention, he would 
remark with absolute sincerity, " I have absolutely 
nothing to say ; " and then would go on to make, es- 
pecially if hissed or interrupted, one of his very best 
speeches. Nothing spurred him like opposition ; and it 
was not an unknown thing for one of his young admir- 
ers to take a back scat in the hall, in order to stimulate 
him by a counterfeited hiss if the meeting seemed tame. 
Then the unsuspecting orator would rouse himself like 
a lion. When this opposition came not from friends 
but foes, it was peculiarly beneficial ; and perhaps the 
greatest oratorical triumph he ever accomplished was 
on that occasion in Faneuil Hall (Jan. 30, 1852), when 
it was re-opened to the abolitionists after the capture 
of the slave Thomas Sims. Mv. Webster's friends were 
there in force, and drowned Mr. Phillips's voice hy re- 
peated cheers for their favorite ; when Mr. Phillips so 
turned the laugh against them each time, in the inter- 
vals wdien they paused for breath, that their cheers 
grew fainter and fainter, and he had at last mobbed 
the mob. 

He used to deny having trained himself for a public 
speaker; drew habitually from but few books, Tocque- 
ville's " Democracy in America " being among the chief 
of these ; but read newspapers enormously, and maga- 
zines a good deal, while he had the memory of an orator 
or a literary man, never letting pass an effective anec- 
dote or a telling fact. These he turned to infinite ac- 
count, never sparing ammunition, and never fearing to 
repeat himself. He used to say that he knew but one 



xiv WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

tiling thoroughly, — the history of the English Revolu- 
tion, — and from this he obtained morals whenever he 
wanted them ; and, to tell the truth, used them in almost 
any direction. He knew the history of the American 
Revolution also, Sam Adams being his favorite hero. 
He was a thorough Bostonian too, and his anti-slavery 
enthusiasm never rose quite so high as when blended 
with local patriotism. No one who heard it can ever 
forget the thrilling modulation of his voice when he 
said, at some special crisis of the anti-slavery agitation, 
"I love inexpressibly these streets of Boston, over whose 
pavements my mother held up tenderly my baby feet ; 
and, if God grants me time enough, I will make them 
too pure to bear the footsteps of a slave." At the very 
outset he doubtless sometimes prepared his speeches 
with care ; but his first great success was won off-hand, 
and afterward, during that period of incessant practice, 
which Emerson makes the secret of his power, he relied 
generally upon his vast accumulated store of facts and 
illustrations, and his tried habit of thinking on his legs. 
On special occasions he would still make preparation, 
and sometimes, though rarely, wrote out his speeches 
beforehand. No one could possibly recognize this, how- 
ever. He never seemed more at his ease, more collo- 
quial, more thoroughly extemporaneous, than in his ad- 
dress before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge ; 
yet it had all been sent to the Boston daily papers in 
advance, and appeared with scarcely a word's variation, 
except where he had been compelled to omit some pas- 
sages for want of time. That was, in some respects, the 
most remarkable effort of his life : it was a tardy recog- 
nition of him by his own college and his own literary 
society ; and he held an unwilling audience spell-bound, 
while bating absolutely nothing of his radicalism. Many 
a respectable lawyer or divine felt his blood run cold, 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. XV 

the next day, when he found that the fascinating orator 
whom he had apphiuded to the echo luid really made 
the assassination of an emperor seem as trivial as the 
doom of a mosquito. 

He occupied during most of his life the willing posi- 
tion of a tribune of the people ; nor was there an}^ social 
class with which he was unwilling to be, logically and 
politically at least, identified. Emerson, while thor- 
oughly true to the anti-slavery movement, always con- 
fessed to feeling a slight instinctive aversion to negroes; 
Theodore Parker uttered frankly his dislike of the Irish. 
Yet neither of these had distinctly aristocratic impulses, 
while Phillips had. His conscience set them aside so 
imperatively, that he himself hardly knew that they 
were there. He was always ready to be identified with 
the colored people ; always read}^ to give his oft-repeated 
lecture on O'Connell, to the fellow-countrj-men of that 
hero : but in these and all cases his democratic habit 
had the good-natured air of some kindly young prince ; 
he never was quite the equal associate that he seemed. 
The want of it never was felt by his associates : it was 
in his dealing with antagonists, that the real attitude 
came out. When he once spoke contemptuously of 
those who dined with a certain Boston club which had 
censured him, as "men of no family," the real mental 
habit appeared. And in his external aspect and bear- 
ing the patrician air never quite left him, — the air 
that he had in college days, or in that period when, 
as Edmund Quincy delighted to tell, an English visitor 
pointed out to George Ticknor two men walking down 
Park Street, and added the cheerfnl remark, "They 
are the only men I have seen in your country who 
looked like gentlemen." The two men were the aboli- 
tionists Quincy and Phillips, in whose personal aspect 
the conservative Ticknor could see little to commend. 



XVI WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

There is no fame so intoxicating or so transient as 
that of mere oratory. Some of the most accomplished 
public speakers whom America has produced have died 
within a few years, in mid-career, and left scarcely a 
Tipple on the surface. Two of these, to name no others, 
were Ex-Governor Bullock of Massachusetts, and Pro- 
fessor Diman of Rhode Island. Neither of them had 
the fortune to be identified with an}^ great moral enter- 
prise, or to stand before the public for a long time, and 
be the mouthpiece of its indignation or its demands. 
It was not chance that gave this position to Wendell 
Phillips: a great many elements of genius, studies, social 
prestige, and moral self-sacrifice, had to be combined to 
produce it. It never turned his head : his aims were 
too high for that ; and he was aided by the happy law 
of compensation, which is apt to make men indifferent 
to easily-won laurels. There is no doubt, that, in the 
height of his fame as a lecturer or platform-speaker, he 
often chafed under the routine and the fatigue ; and 
felt, that, had not fate or Providence betra3^ed him, his 
career would have been very different. He knew, that 
coming forward into life with his powers, and at the 
time he did, he might probably have won the positions 
which went easily to men less richly endowed, — as 
Abbott Lawrence and Robert C. Winthrop, — and that, 
had he been once within the magic circle of public office, 
he could have used it for noble ends, like his favorite. 
Sir Samuel Romilly. " What I should have liked," he 
said once to a friend, "would have been the post of 
United-States senator for Massachusetts;" and, though 
he never even dreamed of this as possible for himself, he 
saw his friend Sumner achieve a position which he, could 
he once have accepted its limitations, might equally have 
adorned. 

It is impossible to say how public office might have 



WENDELL rillLLIPS. Xvii 

affected him ; whether it woiihl liavc f^lvcn him just 
that added amount of reasonableness and ^'ood jud«;- 
ment which in later years seemed often wantini,', or 
whether it would have only betrayed him to new dan- 
gers. He never had it, and the perilous lifelong habits 
of the platform told upon him. The platform-speaker 
has his especial dangers, as conspicuously as the lawyer 
or the clergyman ; he acquires insensibly the mood of 
a gladiator, and, the better his fencing, the more he be- 
comes the slave of his own talent. Lcs homines ererc^s 
a Vescrime ont beau voidoir mSnager leur adversaire, I'hali- 
tude est plus fort, Us ripostent mahjre eux. As under this 
law the Vicomte de Camors seduced, almost against his 
will, the wife of the comrade to whom he had pledged 
liis life, so Wendell Phillips, once with rapier in hand, 
insensibly fought to win as well as for the glory of God. 
The position once taken must be maintained, — the 
opponent must be overwhelmed by almost any means. 
No advocate in any court was quicker than he to shift 
his ground, to introduce a new shade of meaning, to 
abandon an obvious interpretation and insist on a more 
subtle one. Every man makes mistakes ; but you might 
almost count upon your ten fingers the ninnber of times 
that Wendell Phillips, during his whole lifetime, owned 
himself to be in the wrong, or made a concession to an 
adversary. In criticising his career in this respect, we 
may almost reverse the celebrated censure passed on 
the charge of the Six Hundred, and may say that it 
was not heroic, but it was war. 

If this was the case during the great contest with 
slavery, the evil was more serious after slavery fell. 
The civil war gave to Phillips, as it gave to many men, 
an opportunity ; but it was not, in his ease, a complete 
opportunity. At first he was disposed to welcome 
secession, as fulfilling the wishes of years; " to " build," 



XVlll WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

as he said, " a bridge of gold for the Southern States 
to walk over in leaving the Union." This mood 
passed ; and he accepted the situation, aiding the de- 
parting regiments with voice and purse. Yet it was 
long before the war took a genuinely anti-slavery char- 
acter, and younger men than he were holding aloof 
from it for that reason. He distrusted Lincoln for his 
deliberation, and believed in Frdmont; in short, for a 
variety of reasons, took no clear and unmistakable at- 
titude. After the war had overthrown slavery, the 
case was even worse. It was a study of character to 
note the differing demeanors of the great abolition- 
ist leaders after that event. Edmund Quincy found 
himself wholly out of harness, desoeuvre : there was no 
other battle worth fighting. He simply reverted, for 
the rest of his life, to that career of cultivated leisure 
from which the anti-slavery movement had wrenched 
him for forty years ; he was a critic of music, a fre- 
quenter of the theatres. Garrison, on the other hand, 
with his usual serene and unabated vigor, went on con- 
tending for the rights of the freedmen and of women, 
as, before, for those of the slaves. Unlike either of 
these, Wendell Phillips manifested for the remainder 
of his life a certain restlessness ; always seemed to be 
crying, like Shakspeare's Hotspur, " Fye upon this idle 
life ! " and to be always seeking for some new tourna- 
ment. This would not perhaps have been an evil, had 
he not carried with him into each new enterprise tlie 
habits of the platform, and of the anti-slavery platform 
in particular. There never was a great moral move- 
ment so logically simple as the anti-slavery reform : 
once grant that man could not rightfully hold property 
in man, and the intellectual part of the debate was set- 
tled ; only the moral appeal remained, and there Wen- 
dell Phillips was master, and could speak as one having 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. xix 

aiitliority. Slavery gone, the teniperanre ami \\ (.111:111- 
suffrage agitations remained for him as licfoic. IJut lie 
also found himself thrown, l)y his dwn lilVluntr Imhii, 
into a series of new reforms, where the (piestions in- 
volved were wholly different from tliose of the anti- 
slavery movement, and were indeed at a different stage 
of development. You could not settle the relations of 
capital and labor off-hand, by saying, as in tlie case of 
slavery, "Let my people go : " the matter was far more 
complex. It was like trying to adjust a chronometer 
with no other knowledge than that Avon l)y oI)serviiig 
a sun-dial. In dealing with questions of cun('nc\-, it 
was still worse. And yet Wendell Phillips went on, 
for the remainder of his life, preaching crusades on 
these difficult problems, which he gave no sign of ever 
having seriously studied; and appealing to sympathy 
and passion as ardently as if he still had three million 
slaves for Avhom to plead. 

It was worse still, when, with the natural habit of a 
reformer, he found himself readily accepting the com- 
panionship into which these new causes brought him. 
The tone of the anti-slavery apostles was exceedingly 
high, but there w^ere exceptions even there. " He is a 
great scoundrel," said Theodore Parker of a certain 
blatant orator in Boston, "but he loves liberty.'' It 
was true, and was fairly to be taken into account. You 
do not demand a Sunday-school certificate from the man 
who is rescuing your child from a burning house. But 
it is to be said, beyond this, that, tliongh the demagogue 
and the true reformer are at opposite extremes, tiiey 
have certain points in common. Society is apt to make 
them both for a time outcasts, and outcasts fraternize. 
They alike distrust the staid and conventional class, and 
they are distrusted by it. When a man once falls into 
the habit of measuring merit by martyrdoms, he dis.- 



XX WENDELL PHILLIPS. 

criminates less closely than before, and the best-abused 
man, whatever the ground of abuse, seems nearest to 
sainthood. Mr. Phillips, at his best, had not always 
shown keen discrimination as a judge of character; and 
the fact that the Boston newspapers thought ill of 
General Butler, for instance, was to him a strong point 
in that gentleman's favor. In this he showed himself 
less able to discriminate than his old associate Stephen 
Foster, one of the most heroic and frequently mobbed 
figures in anti-slavery history ; for Stephen Foster sat 
with reluctance to see Caleb Gushing rudely silenced in 
Faneuil Hall by his own soldiers, after the Mexican 
war; and lamented that so good a mob, which might 
have helped the triumph of some great cause, should be 
wasted on one whom he thought so worthless a creature. 
Fortunate it would have been for Wendell Phillips if he 
had gone no farther than this ; but he insisted on argu- 
ing from the mob to the man, forgetting that people may 
be censured as well for their sins as for their virtues. 
The last years of his life thus placed him in close co- 
operation with one whose real motives and methods 
were totally unlike his own, — indeed, the most unscru- 
pulous soldier of fortune who ever posed as a Friend of 
the People on this side the Atlantic. 

But all these last days, and the increasing irritability 
with which he impulsively took up questions to which 
he could contribute little beyond courage and vehe- 
mence, will be at least temporarily forgotten now that 
he is gone. They will disappear from memory like the 
selfishness of Hancock, or the vanity of John Adams, 
in the light of a devoted, generous, and courageous 
career. With all his faults, his inconsistencies, his im- 
petuous words, and his unreasoning prejudices, Wendell 
Phillips belonged to the heroic type. Whether we 
regard him mainly as an orator, or as a participant in 



"WENDELL PniLLIPS. xxi 

important events, it is certain tliat no liistory of the 
United States will ever be likely to omit him. It is 
rarely that any great moral agitation bequeaths to pos- 
terity more than two or three names: the Knglish slave- 
trade abolition has left only Clarksoii and Wilberforce 
in memory; the great Corn Law contest, only ("ubdeii 
and Bright. The American anti-slavery movement will 
probably embalm the names of Garrison, Pliillips, and 
John Brown. This is for the future to decide. Mean- 
while, it is certain that Wendell Phillii)S liad, during 
life, that quality which Emerson thought the highest 
of all qualities, — of being "something that eainiot be 
skipped or undermined." Now that he is gone, even 
those who most criticised him will instinctively feel 
that one great chapter of American history is closed. 



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